Witnessing

In my paper files I came across a course description from I believe the 97-98 academic year. It was being offered at the Centre for Comparative Literature (University of Toronto) by Ross Chambers, visiting as the Northrop Frye Chair. The seminar was about "the witnessing of historically traumatic events". Chambers proposes a hypothesis:

My hypothesis is that cultures reserve the category I call obscene (etymologically "off-stage" for events and experiences that are historically real but which cannot be represented under existing genre-dispensations which correspond, so to speak, the cultural on-stage. [...] witnessing, then, is the process by which obscenity is brought to cultural attention and the unspeakable comes to be discursively acknowledged through being brought on-stage. In that sense it is an oppositional practise because the obscene is subject to cultural denial, which witnessing resists.

The parenthesis opened at the adverb "etymologically" does not get closed...

Leads me to thinking about the status of sound generated off-stage and carried from the wings and the rafters to the audience out there.

The genre shifting sometimes results in the removing of brackets, fences, barriers. And leaving an open chamber )))

And so for day 667
10.10.2008

Seeding the Long Tail

It's an active form of writing that honours the art of contemplation. In a way it is living a mandarin style in the open. The genre is the familiar common place book. A gathering.

The gesture is simple (and thereby difficult in its simplicity). It is very much a product of collecting and annotating. Adding one's own stamp to a scroll and by implication inviting others to think about how they read and view.

So it is a little like geocaching. Or perhaps more like tree planting. A geocacher might be around to hear the hoots and hollers of the treasure hunters experiencing the find. A tree planter works for a future further out than the human lifetime.

So it is like leaving traces. Accumulating a treasure trove. And letting the guardian dragon slumber eternally. The pieces are free for the taking and the encounter is fortuitous.

Traffic is generated by "word of mouth" or the vagaries of search engines. Self-promotion is almost eschewed. Almost. For a whisper of personality is tucked in around the edges.

Samuel R. Delany's descriptions of micro-theatre in Triton provide an analogy for the shape of the process of offering that is at the heart of seeding the long tail. The performance draws on the Renaissance genre of the dialogue of the dead and augments it with a twist of ancestor worship. It is like enshrining with irreverence at times but always with meaningful and provocative engagement. Like all good theatre it rehearses patterns and suggests shifts.

It tends to avoid addressing the crowd. It constructs its reader as singular and its constructions as singularities. Even as it will playfully run through a series of "we" and on occasion inflect "you" towards the threesome or more.

The effect is cumulative. The writing self is the first reader and each entry is published as an engagement with a way of reading and living. There is an ethical dimension to this absorbing and assembling of words. One begins to intuit one's style and tweak it now and then.  Like good practice the writer as first reader is attentive.

The trick is to cultivate the rarefied art of Sprezzatura: "well-practiced naturalness" or "rehearsed spontaneity," a trait possessed by the most gifted conversationists, debaters, politicians, intellectuals, teachers, socialites, and even Trappist monks.
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/pedagogy/blogcraft.htm

When it really works it creates intimacy. What it is is a meta-erotics to live in the world automagically. It constantly models a giving of oneself over to the mind and the body. Totally at ease with process. Being in the world not of words by means of words.

And so for day 666
09.10.2008

Liminal Delight

Sutherland, the voice of the aesthetic arbitrator, in Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance reminds me at times in some of his baroque formulations of the passage in Edmund White's Forgetting Elena about the possible permutations of the pronunciations of "dah-ling". Here is an excerpt from a stupendous soliloquy invoking a particular right of passage.

He squeezed his hand and smiled. "There are three lies in life," Sutherland said to his young companion, whose first night this was in the realm of homosexuality and whose introduction to it Sutherland had taken upon himself to supervise. "One, the check is in the mail. Two, I will not come in your mouth. And three, all Puerto Ricans have big cocks," he said. And with that he leaned forward and cupped the young man's hand in his long black gloves and said to him in that low, breathless voice: "You are beginning a journey, far more bizarre than any excursion up the Nile. You have set foot tonight on a vast, uncharted continent. Do let me take you as far as I can. I shall hold your hand as far as we can go together, and point out to you the more interesting flora and fauna. I will help you avoid the quicksand in which you can drown, or at least waste a great deal of time, the thorn-thickets, the false vistas — ah," he sighed. "We have many of those, we have much trompe l'oeil in this very room!" he said ecstatically, cocking his cigarette holder at a sprightly angle. "So let us go upriver together as far as we may," he resumed, once more cupping his charge's white, slim hand, "and remember to ask questions, and notice everything, the orchids and the fruit flies, the children rummaging for food in piles of shit, and the ibis that flies across the moon at dusk. Let us go at least as far as the falls. What a journey! If only I can help you avoid the detours, culs-de-sac, fevers, and false raptures that I have suffered." He squeezed the fellow's hand and said, echoing the signal phrase of a Bar Mitzvah he had once attended in the guise of a Jewish matron from Flatbush: "For tonight, my dear, you are a homosexual!"

Glorious use of register. Fabulous initiation.

And so for day 665
08.10.2008

Lovely Ending

Last sentences from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery translated by Alison Anderson.

Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never.

Beauty, in this world.

Given the earlier remarks in the novel about commas, one needs to pay particular attention to the pause signalled in the last sentence. Just what thought occupies the space?

And so for day 664
07.10.2008

Retracing Sequence and Series

From "Cartouches" the 11 December 1977 entry (p. 215) in Derrida's The Truth in Painting translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod.

Retrace one's steps, always, again, narrative/series [récit/série].

I am grateful to the translators for recording the assonance that marks the play of the terms in French.

Makes me harken back to my own mediation on narration, narrative and sequence: Storing and Storing http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/S6.HTM which after all these years I would like to revisit and suggest the addition of "Shuffling".

And so for day 663
06.10.2008

Florilegium

Some of the epigraphs to various sections from H.L. Hix Chromatic

Spinoza (Ethics)
Desire is the very nature or essence of every single individual.

Wittgenstein (Remarks on Colour)
How must we look at this problem in order for it to become solvable?

Bach (The Well-Tempered Clavier)
For the use and practice of young musicians who desire.

I love the way the theme of desire and individuality makes its resurgence.

And so for day 662
05.10.2008

Blossom

From a friend who upon completing a reading of A Lover's Cock [poems by Verlaine and Rimbaud translated by J. Murat and W. Gunn (Gay Sunshine Press, 1979) made the wry comment on the pronunciation of the French poet's name:

Rim Bud

And so for day 661
04.10.2008

Belonging and Place

Visual artist, Guillermo Gòmez-Peña writes in "Documented/Undocumented" (The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy [1988]) about displaced Latin Americans:

Our generation belongs to the world's biggest floating population: the weary travelers, the dislocated, those of us who left because we didn't fit anymore, those of us who still haven't arrived because we don't know where to arrive at, or because we can't go back anymore.

It might be tempting to extrapolate the description and apply it to gay people who have migrated to cities. However the passage continues and it is not so clear as to how the description would or could apply to other groups.

Our deepest generational emotion is that of loss, which comes from our having left. Our loss is total and occurs at multiple levels: loss of our country (culture and national rituals) and our class (the "illustrious" middle class and upper middle). Progressive loss of language and literary culture in our native tongue (those of us who live in non-Spanish-speaking countries); loss of ideological meta-horizons (the repression against and division of the left) and of metaphysical certainty.

But if the loss is specific, the gain is translatable to other contexts.

In exchange, what we won was a vision of a more experimental culture, that is to say, a multi-focal and tolerant one. [...] new options in social, sexual, spiritual, and aesthetic behavior.

Read on, in the translation by Rubén Martinez, and discover that any mappings of new options arising out of a tolerant culture are achieved at a price, that of challenging artworld "mechanisms of mythification" and working at "true intercultural dialogue". A simple reading off of a queer context leaves too much behind (ironic in the context of a discourse about loss). Collaboration is offered as an alternative to simple appropriation.

Together, we can collaborate in surprising cultural projects but without forgetting that both should retain control of the product, from the planning stages up through to distribution. If this doesn't occur, then intercultural collaboration isn't authentic. We shouldn't confuse true collaboration with political paternalism, culture vampirism, voyeurism, economic opportunism, and demogogic multiculutralism.

Gòmez-Peña is writing about Latino and Anglo cultures. Could it be collaboration be done in the context of hetero and homo relations?

And so for day 660
03.10.2008

Libraries, Gardens and Arabian Nights

I have always thought of gardens as libraries — housing genetic material to be read and recombined. Cameron Smith in the Toronto Star (June 14, 2003) in "The army in our gardens" makes a similar point.

A garden, then is a storybook of life. You can read as much, or as little, as you like. It is so full of stories, you will never come to the end. And, as in The Arabian Nights, each story so fascinates, you end up longing for the next one.

Smith goes on to review a book. A Breath of Fresh Air: Celebrating Nature and School Gardens by Elise Houghton with photographs by Robert Christie. He writes:

The book has 129 colour photographs of ponds, gardens, rehabilitated areas, and — the ones I like the most — of children, and their expressions of wonder.

If I can't find the book in my local library, I might settle for a World Wide Web search for "children AND gardens".

And so for day 659
02.10.2008

Reductions

Colm Tóibín in a review of the poetry and prose of Thom Gunn collected in Love in a Dark Time concludes

[...] we must acknowledge that his talent, his seriousness, his intelligence and his generosity, if they can be separated from it, have been as important as his homosexuality in the making of his poems.

Following these words, it perhaps unfair to characterize Sky Gilbert's contributions to new holes in the wall (York Poetry Workshop, 1975) and much of his oeuvre as being composed under the sign of competition. From that 1975 anthology I take as emblematic the lines from "Men" that assert that men must do battle "And view each other with suspicion" and even sexual intimacy is a site of struggle ("Heaven help us if we were to embrace"). In so many ways all that follows after these early poems is cast in an agonistic style. A perpetual edge. Keen measurement against the oppressor. Assessments always either implied or explicit. There is no end to judgement. All rests in arbitration.

It is not so much that values are enunciated for in any event to present words to the world is to mark and honour as valuable some experience, event or thing. It's the pitch of the take-it-or-leave-it kind that makes me circle back to the keyword "suspicion". It is as if our poet doesn't trust the reader. And yet the petulance is set aside with a joyously juvenile

P.P.P.P.S. I love you.

at the end of the 2003 Temptations For A Juvenile Delinquent.

At our age we are usually in the mode of overhearing and it is an effort to see myself as that "you" (especially in the last line of a poem giving ever more complicated instructions in "How to Take Care of My Cat").

I want to drop out of the competition. But I read on. I even re-read. Aware of other games — the dizziness offered by multiplied post-scriptums. Finding it odd that I can keep up. Remembering that skipping rope and multiplying verbal complexity, piling words upon words, is both a competition and a delirious, delicious, inducement of vertigo. A gone again.

And so for day 658
01.10.2008